SESSION 14
JUSTINE A CHAMBERS on DANCE AS A LIVING ARCHIVE FOR PERSONAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY, RITUAL AND RESISTANCE
&
DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA on VIRTUALITY
Tuesday May 2, 7pm
The Foreshore
Other Sights at Access Gallery
222 East Georgia, Vancouver BC
Please join us for these two short presentations followed by discussion.
CHAMBERS considers that describing dance as ephemeral calls its value into question. It is not only the erasure of embodied experience as a tool for cognition, but more importantly how it functions as a rich, living archive for personal and cultural history, ritual and resistance.
FERREIRA DA SILVA will comment on what might become possible when thinking reaches beyond the limits of reflection. Reading Octavia E. Butler’s female characters, Dana (Kindred), Lauren Olamina (Parable of the Sower) and Anyanwu (Patternist Series) as black feminist poethical renderings of the Real, she explores the imagination’s capacity to explore the body’s hidden treasure, which is the otherwise of the world as we know it.
BIOS
Justine A. Chambers’ interests lie in collaborative creation, expansively positioning dance performance, and re-imagining the performer/viewer relationship. She is drawn to the movement of all bodies, and focuses on the dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. She is associate artist to The Dance Centre and has been creating performance projects throughout Canada since 2000.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, PhD is the Director of The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She is also a Visiting Professor of Law at Birkbeck-University of London (UK) and Adjunct Professor of Curatorial Practice at MADA-Monash University (Australia). Her academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and onto-epistemological dimensions of modern thought. Academic publications include Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and the edited volume Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (with Paula Chakravartty, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). She has written for publications of the 2016 Liverpool and Sao Paulo Biennials as well as for the 2017 Documenta 14 – Reader and Venice Biennale. Her artistic work includes collaborations, such as the films Serpent Rain (with Arjuna Neuman), 2016 and From Left to Night (with Wendelien van Oldenborgh), 2014 and the play Return of the Vanished Peasant (with Rosalind Martin) as well as events and texts which are part of her Poethical Readings practice (with Valentina Desideri). She was an advisor to Natasha Ginwala, curator of the Contour 8 Biennale (Mechelen, 2017).
Audio recording of the event:
Due to technical error Justine’s portion was not recorded. Many apologies for this.
Image Credits:
Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y.: 1979) First Edition;
Justine A. Chambers, Family Dinner, 2013. Photo: Yvonne Chew